“I will praise you whilst I have breath for speech! What are our paltry conventional judgments? In that I love you, you are to me a peerless woman. Have you not stooped to me from the circle of your glory? Are you not to me embodied goodness, purity, truth? What am I that you should love me, my soul’s worship? Yet your eyes say it, your smile says it, your lips make golden music of the words.”
She sighed again, drinking in his rapturous adoration with closed eyes.
“And you?” she asked. “When did you first love me? Did I not seem to you a very silly, empty, frivolous woman?”
“I loved your name long before I saw you. They talked to me at the rectory, and called you the Lady of Knightswell. I pictured you, and indeed not far unlike yourself; just so gracious, so bright, so gloriously a woman. I looked over to Knightswell from my window, and wondered if ever we should meet. What kindness of fate that brought me that day past the cottage!”
She was still musing over the growth of this flower in her heart.
“I knew it when the pain was over, and I could lie and think. It was all so clear to me then. I had escaped a terrible danger; but for the fall”--her voice sank--“I might never have known this happiness. I was in ceaseless fear lest you should have gone. I asked often if you had called; if you had known how I longed for your name among those who called! There was no need of occupation for me. It was quite enough to lie and think of our talks together, to call back your voice and your look. Oh, I _longed_ to send a word to you; you were so lonely, so unhappy. All that is over now, dearest? You will never again be comfortless?”
“That again!” He covered his face with his hands. “Once more!”
“If I could but hear that for ever! Shall I hear it when this hour has become part of our memory, in days after this? Dare I think of it as music that I may hear at will?”
“It shall never fail you, if your ear does not weary.”
“If my eyes weary of the light of heaven?”
“Ada’s marriage has been postponed on account of my illness; it would have taken place before this. When it is over, and I have discharged my duty to the end, then----”
She paused, not avoiding his gaze, but meeting it with simplest truth, her lips trembling a little.
